The Problem with Moore's Law and Peak Technology, Stealing Ideas

11:59 PM

I haven't written an entry the past few days and I don't remember when, but there was a day when my neighborhood didn't have any water. Maybe it was actually for a day or two, but I went through like 6 gallons of reserve water for flushing, drinking, and washing my hands. I should've written an entry on that day so I could've reflected on what it was like not having to flush, not being able to wash my hands, and so on. Yeah it's interesting. I grew up in a third world country, the Philippines, and I remember we had to flush the toilets by filling a bucket up with water and dumping it in the toilet. To take a shower, we would fill up a bucket with water, and then use a smaller bucket scoop to pour over our head and body.

It's interesting growing up with no toilet flushing and no shower, and often frequent brownouts. There is a difference between brownouts and blackouts too, a blackout is an entire cutoff of electricity, whereas a brownout is a reduction in voltage due to too much electricity demand, causing electronics to fail and turn off or maybe even short circuit. It's interesting experiencing the same issues again now because they just seem so normal to me. I just know that if you took someone from the States who has never experienced this and had them live in this kind of environment, that they'd complain about it. For me, I just experience it as a minor discomfort as a part of an interesting life.

Anyway modern infrastructure is truly amazing and also something we take for granted much like computer processors, electricity, radio signals, and so on. It's so fascinating we have everything anyone could ever want, ever, but we are all still so unhappy and have problems and issues. The biggest issue in my opinion is that we still needlessly kill and eat animals, I haven't eaten meat for over 10 years, it is very unreasonable people still pay for the barbaric slaughter of animals to eat their flesh, when there's no need to and there's plenty of plant foods available.

Another thing is that all our technology is already good enough. It's perfect the way it is. Honestly computers are fast enough, our phones are good enough. I don't even see a point to be honest for any improved faster processing speed in our processors now. The entirety of NASA in the 1960s had a computer that had a processing speed of like 2 megahertz (2 million processes per second), whereas my computer has, let me see, 3.2 gigahertz or 3.2 billion processes per second over 10 cores, so roughly 32 billion processes per second.

Also, even though our computers are far faster and can calculate far more today, I probably wouldn't be able to out calculate a NASA scientist from the 1960s. This person would be way smarter than me, and have a far better understanding of science, physics, chemistry, that even with the help of a computer I wouldn't be able to overcome them. So the tool doesn't matter, it depends on the user.

It would take the entirety of the 1960s NASA around 16000 seconds or around 11 hours to calculate what my computer can in 1 second. This sounds impressive, but even in 2012 computers were pretty much already just as fast. The improvement of computers today compared to back then are pretty marginal.

I mean we even had 64gb ram computers back in 2011, I remember because there were people making PC builds of computers that had 64gb ram. My current laptop I'm typing this on has 16gb ram, so it's 1/4th of the ram of a maxed out computer from 2011, and I got this computer in 2021, 10 years later. I do have a computer as well that has like 128gb ram, but that's my maxed out computer which I'm not typing this on.

People actually believe our phones and laptops are so much better today, and in many ways they are, but they're really not. The improvements are really marginal. The iPhone 4 came out in 2010, and it was a small phone. Our phones today have gotten bigger, which added extra room for extra components and a larger battery, arguably it feels like the iPhone 4 is more advanced because it's smaller and does all the same things. The touchscreen, the sound, the processing speed, are pretty much identical to what we had back then. Our phones from back then do all the same things our phones today can do like browse the Internet, take photos, listen to music, etc. If there's any improvement, it's hard to notice. The cameras and storage space are the exception, those had major and noticeable improvements.

There's also something called Moore's Law which has been true for the past 50 years, and looking it up it's something like the amount of transistors we can fit into a processor doubles every 2 years. So back in the 1970s we could probably fit like 1000 transistors into a processor let's say. Today we can fit hundreds of billions, maybe trillions or more, number of transistors into a processor. The problem with this is that the processor is an arbitrary size. We can just double the size of a processor and place just as many transistors as we can in there, and voila, that would double the amount of transistors in a processor. For the iPhone 4 for example, it's a smaller phone, I'm not sure, but I think the processor for it was also smaller than the processors we have today. Let me look it up.

Yeah so I can't find any info on how big today's processors are, I didn't spend much time looking though, but from the 2010-2011 era, for the iPhone 4 I found that it had an A4 processor which had a processor die size of 53.3 mm^2. Now the next year in 2011, the processor die size was more than double, 122.2 mm^2 of area. So going by Moore's law, that the number of transistors in a processor doubles every two years, all you have to do is double the size of the processor to get more transistors in a processor.

So the number of transistors we can fit into a space has significantly decreased, our technology there has become more advanced. Back in 2011 we could fit a transistor in one 45 nm area, today we can fit a transistor in a 5 nm area, or something like that. It is much smaller, our technology there has definitely advanced. However, it still holds true that we can just double the size of the space to double the amount we can fit in. So even if we kept a 5 nm sized transistor forever, all we would have to do is just double the size of the processor every two years to keep the law true.

But anyway, as I've said, things are already good enough today. I think the concept of peak technology exists, it's a physical limit. Like bicycles improved tremendously for years, until it reached the peak of bicycle technology, with switchable gears. Since that came out, there's been no improvements really since then. A bike from the 90s is just as good or some may argue even better than bikes that come out today. They say it's better because of rim brakes, which is a less advanced braking system than the now common disc brake system, but arguably better because it's simpler and takes far less space and weight, and often brakes even better.

All this stuff I just came up with the topic myself and researched it a bit. I didn't hear these opinions from anyone else, I am the one saying there will eventually be a point for peak technology.

An annoying thing too is that old content gets replaced by newer ones, even if the newer content has nothing new to offer. It's idiotic. There was a tweet from May that received over a billion views, likely inflated numbers. The tweet said something like "Without looking it up, name a famous historic battle" and people in the tweet are posting like really dumb and idiotic memes like celebrity drama between two people that happened at one point. I don't think that's a historic battle, that's just some drama.

But anyway, that tweet happened in May. I did a search for that same tweet today and of course people tweeted the same thing since then, and it just showed me results of that same tweet from the past few days. I couldn't even find the tweet from May even when I sorted by top posts. So literally new ideas die. The person who came up with the original tweet is now gone and forgotten. Even though I came up with this concept of peak technology, and I attached screenshots of search results that I get today if I search for peak technology, someone can just steal it and whoever posts newer content about it becomes more relevant.

I think society will be worse if the popular people just steal ideas and tweets from others, and then they can claim it's theirs because they're more popular. The person who tweeted that historic battle tweet, she only has 11k followers. The results that came up yesterday searching for the same tweet, were from accounts that had millions of followers. It holds true that "history is decided by the winners", because the more popular tweet will be the one that's quoted, even if that tweet wasn't their original idea. That sucks. That really sucks.

Anyway I had a really good idea posting today. These are all my original ideas. I didn't take them from another video or tweeter or whatever. The screenshots show that searching for the concept of "Peak Technology" or even "The trouble with Moore's Law" doesn't come up with results for any of my ideas. Peak technology is the idea that our technology is already good enough, any improvements today are marginal, we don't really need to advance further in technology now, it's all already really amazing.

The trouble with Moore's Law is that we can just double the processor size to double the number of transistors. So it's a stupid concept to be honest, and that's not what any of the search results discuss. Some of the search results are even like "Is this the end for Moore's Law?" and the answer is no, it can never end. All you have to do is double the processor size, and you will satisfy Moore's Law. It might mean a bigger phone, but it's been the case that phones are getting bigger anyway. Just make the battery slightly smaller to fit it.

We've already reached peak battery a long time ago too, there has been no improvements to it for decades. Phones today can hold a larger charge only because the phone size has also increased which means we can fit a bigger battery in there. That's really all it is.

Anyway that was my day today.